Drawing by my artistic niece, Joelle
I heard about Robin William’s death Monday evening on my way home from working with a client. When I heard about how he died, I instantly felt this wave of sadness come over me and my eyes watered up. The first thing I thought was that his depression had gotten the best of him.
Even though I knew that he suffered from depression and struggled with substance abuse, for some reason…I thought that life and age meant that he had somehow gotten past that and learned how to better cope.
It seems as though many of us who were fans can recall the different times he made us laugh. As a child of the 70’s, I became a huge fan of his during Mork and Mindy days and loved him even more when he played the role of Popeye. I thought he was the perfect Popeye.
The irony is that Robin Williams played Popeye, who was a character with purposeful contradictions. He was often depicted as capable of coming up with solutions to problems that seemed too great to overcome. A can of spinach devoured and he would have superhuman strength to persevere in overcoming any obstacle that involved the guarantee of world peace or winning back his love, Olive Oyl.
There are many other roles where Robin Williams played a kind of hero that we all could admire. I think that the question leaving many of us in the dark is why Robin could play these roles of saving others, but when it came time to save his own self, he failed.
It seems like the most important thing to take away from a tragedy like this, is to note the crucial need there is for people to take mental illness more seriously. Just like the diseases of the body that health professionals and people treat with urgent care, so must we get to a place where diseases of the mind are better understood and provided the proper treatment.
After all, if the brain is the organ that acts on the rest of the body and forms the physical structure associated with the mind, shouldn’t we begin to look at this more closely and take into account that depression is just as harmful to our existence as cancer is?